Beloved Boy
by calledbyname
Summary: Petunia had to admit to herself sometimes that the boy frightened her.


_A/N: This was written as a class project for an awesome professor. To make the idea I was supposed to explore work I had to bend canon a little. I could only make Petunia's actions comprehensible (if still inexcusable) if I assumed Harry had not always been in the cupboard. It is one thing to do what Petunia does in this story; it is another to presume a one-year-old is full of evil and raise him in abject neglect. It's my feeling that if Petunia and Vernon really had done the latter, neither they nor Harry would be anything near the level of psychological health they display in the books._

The children were playing hide-and-seek in the garden.

Petunia far preferred it when Dudley mixed with more suitable boys from school, but Piers and Anders were both busy, so he and Harry were left together. She'd seen Harry hiding on the roof of the garden shed the last time she'd looked out the kitchen window, as Dudley searched the hedges. Then she'd looked away to rinse the silver she was polishing.

Letting Harry play was always such a dangerous thing. You never knew when he might have a tantrum-or some _weirdness_-and Petunia really didn't trust him around normal, decent children. Of course she was obliged to send him to school and let him go when he received invitations, and not single him out too much; it would have caused talk. But- She always stopped short here. But- if she could send him away...

Nonsense; there was nowhere for him to go except with _them;_ and that, never.

It might have been different if Harry had been a sweet and trusting child, like Dudley. Dudley was easy to love, not standoffish like his cousin. Harry was such a strange child. It had been years since she'd seen him cry.

Harry, at five, had skinned his knee on the garden path, when she and Vernon had been in the sitting-room. She'd heard noises in the kitchen and come to find him on the counter with one foot in the sink, trying to put small sticking plasters over the mess on his knee. Quite without her, he'd pushed a chair over so he could climb up, and washed the knee himself. When she came in he looked at her, hands in midair holding a sticking plaster, those bright green eyes accusing and utterly dry.

Petunia had to admit to herself sometimes that the boy frightened her.

Dudley came in crying as she was arranging the spoons in the silver chest, as if-horrible thought-her thoughts had summoned him. He could only mutely thrust his hands out, one of them holding a bright red patch, so she could see the cut in his palm. He trembled as she made soothing noises and led him to the sink. Harry came in as she did so, his hands in his pockets, with a cool, indifferent air, as if feigning innocence. When she caught that insolent gaze Petunia snapped, "Get the medicine kit."

Dudley kept flinching away when she gently rubbed ointment into the scratch on his hand. "Now, Dudderkins, what happened?"

"He fell on a piece of metal-" Harry began, and she silenced him with a look.

"H-he was chasing me 'round the garden boxes-" Dudley said chokily. "He was running really fast, Mummy."

"There, there," she soothed him. "Harry, I've told you to be more careful."

Harry only replied with an insolent silence.

Not long after that came the incident with the haircut—which, to Petunia, really did prove that the boy was deeply unnatural. It was the first—first _true_ freakishness.

She didn't mention it to Vernon. "Petunia," he said over breakfast, the next day, looking at his nephew's suspiciously messy head, "I thought you said you were going to cut that boy's hair. It's dreadful."

"I did a little trim," she soothed, her fingers drumming nervously on the table. "It's so untidy. I really couldn't do much without making it look dreadful."

Harry kept his eyes down on his plate, but he wore a strange expression; the word _triumphant_ entered Petunia's mind, and she chased it out again.

"It could hardly be any more dreadful than it is now," Vernon said, but left it there.

It started, Petunia thought, when Dudley wanted his toy back. The novelty of summer holidays had disappeared after the first few weeks, so both the boys had got to the point of being cross and bored, so as a fight it might not have bothered her—but it was just the start.

Vernon had got Dudley the toy for his birthday; it was some little handheld gadget you could play videogames on. Harry'd picked it up one morning when Dudley had left it in the sitting-room the night before, and played on it before his cousin came down to breakfast; Dudley was busy getting ready for a bicycling outing with his friends to the river, and didn't notice or object. Harry spent hours glued to the thing before Petunia peeled him away to prepare lunch, and when Dudley came back that afternoon, refused to return it.

Petunia tried to end their quarrel by telling Harry to give it back, but Harry kept his grip on the toy. "I've only had it this morning!" he insisted. "Dudley's hardly used it since his birthday!"

Dudley chose that moment to make a grab for the toy, and might have succeeded were it not for Harry's tenacious grasp on it. The two boys briefly engaged in a fit of tug-of-war, before Dudley's hand slipped off in one final tug, which caused the thing to fly out of Harry's hand and hit the floor. Dudley darted in to regain possession.

"Oh, he's broken it!" he cried.

"Here, Duddy, let me see." She moved to peer over his shoulder, then took the toy out of his hands. It was oddly warm in her hands, as though it had been laying on a heating element; the screen was an ugly black edged with purple and the yellow-green of the screen, like a bruise. It cooled as she held it, but would not turn on when Dudley showed her the button to press.

"Harry—" she said reprovingly, but he was no longer there; his feet were already on the staircase to his room. He refused to look at her when she told him he would be missing dinner, and apologizing to Dudley before he came out again.

That evening, Petunia took Dudley's toy apart with a little jewellery screwdriver and a butterknife. It opened with difficulty, since the casing had warped and nearly fused together in parts, but finally fell apart onto her counter in a mess of plastic and wires and bright green computer chips.

One of the green panels was scorched, acrid black in the centre and warped and bubbled throughout. Petunia quietly showed it to Vernon, keeping her voice down so Dudley wouldn't hear them over the sound of the television.

"We've been too soft with him," Vernon said. "We took that boy in with the best of intentions, and look what it's got us! A messy little ingrate. No, Petunia, it's time to stop pretending we've been doing enough to stamp it out of him."

They caught Harry trying to scale the drainpipe out of his room, which really put a seal on it. Vernon made the case, and Petunia agreed, that what the boy needed was _containment_, careful observation, and no coddling.

She spent the next day going through everything in the downstairs cupboard, moving the Christmas decorations to the attic and Vernon's old sporting equipment to the garage, and Vernon moved down one of Dudley's old mattresses, which fit with room to spare.

That night, when Harry was installed in his cupboard, she went to visit her son. Dudley was still mourning the loss of his Gameboy, but Vernon had replaced it with a computer that he'd spent the day exploring.

"I want you to know," she said tenderly, smoothing his hair away from his face, "that you are the most special little boy in the entire world."


End file.
